France’s Gravelines nuclear faces plant partial shutdowns

France’s Gravelines nuclear plant has been facing partial shutdowns for more than a week now amid a massive swarm of jellyfish in the cooling systems of the reactors.

The jellyfish invasion knocked out four reactors at Gravelines on 11 August, equating to almost 10% of France’s nuclear capacity. in addition, two reactors were undergoing maintenance, meaning that the plant had to fully shut for almost two days.

And while two reactors restarted operations, there are still two unit which remain shut more than one week after the jellyfish invasion. the incident coincided with a sizzling heatwave, which increased both cooling demand and the likelihood of jellyfish presence in seawater…

Of course, this is not the first time that jellyfish wins over nuclear: Gravelines suffered several jellyfish outages in the 90s, and we have seen similar incidents happening in Japan, China, the US and the list goes on…

Energy and electricity security is becoming increasingly complex… this is why it is incredibly important to have a resilient system, with the right back-up facilities, such as CCGTs.

Source: Greg Molnar